America’s navy did exactly what it’s supposed to do: Sink the pirates

 On September 2, 2025, U.S. forces wiped a cartel pirate crew off the map in the Caribbean. The target was a classic modern pirate craft—a swift, unmarked go-fast boat running low in the water, built for speed, smuggling, and violence. It was moving along one of the main narcotics corridors toward the United States when the operation commenced. By the end of the strike, the boat was gone and all eleven cartel pirates on board were dead. It was the moment the new maritime campaign made its message unmistakable: If drug pirates tried to run the Caribbean, the United States would answer with finality.

The predictable wailing from the coastal elites and their favorite “human-rights” NGOs started before the smoke cleared. “War crime!” they shrieked. “Extrajudicial killing!” Spare us. These were not innocent mariners. These were modern pirates—stateless, lawless, armed predators operating exactly the way Blackbeard’s crews did three hundred years ago, except instead of dealing in gold doubloons, they steal American lives with fentanyl and cocaine.

That is the key every red-blooded American already understands: An unflagged vessel on the high seas is a pirate vessel, and those operating it are pirates, full stop. For centuries, long before anyone dreamed up the United Nations or its endless committees of anti-American busybodies, the law of nations has been brutally clear. A ship that refuses the protection of any flag forfeits the protection of all flags. It is an outlaw, subject to the guns of any civilized navy that finds it. The United States Navy wrote that rule with John Paul Jones, and has enforced it ever since. We do not need a permission slip from Geneva or New York to keep doing what we have always done.

These particular pirates belonged to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang—already designated a foreign terrorist organization by our own Treasury Department. They run drugs, traffic women and children, extort, mutilate, and murder. They deliberately strip the flags off their boats so no nation has to answer for them, then race across the ocean to dump death on our shores. That is piracy in every meaningful sense, and pirates have always had one destination when they meet a man-of-war: the bottom.

Congress already settled the question decades ago. The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act makes every stateless drug-running vessel subject to American jurisdiction—no exceptions, no apologies. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force still covers terrorist gangs like Tren de Aragua. That is American law, written by Americans, enforced by Americans, for Americans. Everything else is noise.

The left only discovers its deep reverence for “international law” when it can be weaponized to leash American power. They stay silent when China seizes fishing boats, when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard swarms tankers, or when Venezuelan narco-regimes shelter the same gangs our Navy just sent to Davy Jones. Their selective outrage is as transparent as it is contemptible.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it plainly: “We’re going to keep sinking these boats until the cartels get the message.” That is not bluster. That is policy. Every pirate hull on the ocean floor is one less shipment of poison headed for American schools, American neighborhoods, American families.

The Founding Fathers gave us the Navy for one reason: to hunt down the enemies of this country on the high seas and remove them from the fight. They never asked the world for permission, and we are not about to start now.

So let the cartel apologists and the ACLU file their angry letters. Real Americans are sleeping better knowing their navy is out there doing exactly what it was built to do—treating modern pirates the same way we treated the Barbary pirates: with hot lead and cold steel, no quarter asked and none given.

Fair winds and following seas to every sailor standing the watch. Keep the guns trained outward. There are plenty more pirate boats still afloat, and the United States Navy has a long memory and a short fuse for those who poison our people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/america_s_navy_did_exactly_what_it_s_supposed_to_do_sink_the_pirates.html